Self-described as “a summer camp for genre fans,” The Overlook Film Festival has quickly become the best of New Orleans’s local film fests . . . as long as you’re a total sicko. I consistently catch a wide selection of the year’s most stylish, violent, memorable horrors & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local theaters before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. It’s a surprisingly sociable experience too, considering that its main attraction is quietly watching movies in the dark. In recent years, all Overlook selections have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows attendees to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds they continually run into while lining up for the next fucked-up delight. Everyone’s watching too much, sleeping too little, and loving every horrific minute. It really does capture the summer camp slumber party feeling of staying up all night watching scary movies with your friends after the adults fell asleep and can no longer police what’s playing on the TV.
While this year’s Overlook concluded over a week ago for out-of-town attendees, locals have been spoiled with a daily schedule of “lagniappe” screenings that kept the spooky-good vibes going twice as long as the festival proper. It was a decadent indulgence, especially on the afternoon I was able to sneak away from work early to catch the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers screening uptown on 35mm, exhausted & half awake, like Don Draper on a liquid lunch break. That extended Overlook hangover also gave me time to reflect on what I had seen over the busier opening weekend, gathering my hazy thoughts in a week spent writing short-form reviews. Leaving the couple repertory screenings I caught of the 1950s Body Snatchers and Larry Fessenden’s 1990s hipster vampire picture Habit out of it, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, ranked in the order that I appreciated them, each with a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. For a more detailed recap of the Swampflix Crew’s festival experience beyond these reviews, check out the most recent episode of The Swampflix Podcast.
A Lovecraftian horror story told entirely through local television commercial parodies, in which a small town is swallowed whole by an unholy buffet chain. For all of its high-concept buffoonery, it ends up making a fairly coherent point about how everything decent in the world is currently being devoured in some hostile corporate takeover. Shop local, protect your loved ones, take shelter in the bunker until it’s all over.
A child abduction martial arts revenger that solves all the evils of the world with the swing of a hammer, like You Were Never Really Here restaged as an action thriller. Between this & The Forbidden City, it’s already been a great year for legible fight choreography, but this one is way more relentless & brutal. This is very likely the best action movie since RRR, give or take Furiosa. It also very likely means something that every movie I’m referencing happens to be about human trafficking.
Turns quirky Movie Girlfriend behavior into a grotesque horror show, delivering the first truly scary Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. Turns out, the archetype still a little cute even in that context.
An unofficial Uzumaki spinoff that trades in spirals for human pyramids. This is a delightful headscratcher for audiences of any age, but it’s going to blow the mind of the right teenager who’s watching their first Weird Movie in the phase when their #1 enemy is Conformity.
In which Casper “Too Many Cooks” Kelly graduates from one-off Adult Swim novelties to his first fully formed feature, to mixed results. When it sticks to its cursed Barney & Friends episode premise, it lands all of its laughs & scares. When it deviates from that format, it feels like a confession that this should’ve just been another short, since the idea can’t fully sustain itself for feature length.
Between this & Oddity, it’s clear Damian McCarthy has a unique talent for constructing an effective jump scare. That’s why it’s a little disappointing this one spends so much time dwelling in Elevated Horror atmosphere instead. There are some exceptional witchy gags in this haunted hotel story, but they’re frustratingly sparse.
Perfectly captures the alienation of loving movies but hating movie audiences. Who do you side with here? An incurious public who laughed Exorcist IIoff the screen for taking chances instead of delivering more of the same? Studio executives who lost money on an artistic gamble? Or the artist himself, who improbably staged a literal fever dream on someone else’s dime? Even when this documentary gets cutesy about the mass rejection of the Exorcist sequels, I could feel my blood boiling in general misanthropy.
Supernatural conversion therapy horror set in macho small-town Australia. It shares some cast & crew with Talk to Me, but it plays more like a spiritual sequel to It Follows, making up for that film’s queer oversights
It turns out to not be such a big deal that the latest Scream sequel was a morally & creatively bankrupt shit show. The new Faces of Death has a lot more to say about modern audiences’ relationship with violent entertainment media than any Scream movie has in at least 15 years. The only letdown is that all of its payoffs are intellectual; it’s not nearly upsetting enough to earn its title, at least not for a desensitized social media addict such as myself.
A Māori colonization story set in a kinda-sorta haunted house. It’s the kind of politically furious, grounded-to-reality horror you can tell only dabbles in genre tropes because it’s more difficult to get funding for an arthouse drama on the same subject.
One of the unofficial themes of this year’s Overlook Film Festival was the Adult Swimmification of the modern horror comedy, which has gradually emerged as a trend in the last decade of the genre’s furthest-most surreal outliers. Certainly, there have always been post-Tim and Eric, Adult Swim-style horror comedy oddities scattered throughout Overlook’s diverse programming, from the suburban soccer-mom meltdown Greener Grass to the gross-out Frankenstein riff Dead Lover to last year’s festival-wide spotlight on Kuso director Flying Lotus. This year’s Overlook had an even more pronounced Adult Swim presence than usual, though, not least of all due to the omnipresent ambassadorship of The People’s Joker herself, Vera Drew. Ostensibly flown out to participate in a panel about “Techno Horrors in the 21st Century,” Drew could be seen (and heard, thanks to her iconic Jokerfied laugh) at various movies throughout the weekend, taking just as much advantage of her festival pass as anyone else roaming the French Quarter shopping mall hub. The least surprising place to find her, of course, was a double feature of the two most Adult Swim-coded selections in the program, since her own aggressively surreal editing style has helped guide the rhythms of that particular genre niche in projects like Comedy Bang! Bang!, On Cinema at the Cinema, and the aforementioned People’s Joker. Spotting Vera Drew in line for this year’s absurdist horror comedy selections felt like a pre-emptive stamp of approval that we were in the exact right place, swimming with the adults in the horror-comedy deep end.
If any one title could claim to have earned its Adult Swim bona fides, it was Buddy, the debut feature from director Casper Kelly. Kelly first made a name for himself with 2014’s Adult Swim short Too Many Cooks, followed by more recent Adult Swim experiments in the weirdo-comedy block’s Yule Log series. Like those two previous attention-grabbers, Buddy starts as an eerily accurate parody of a long-dead television format, which Kelly then subverts by underlining its most uncanny qualities. After parodying 90s sitcom intros (in Too Many Cooks) and seasonal yule log screensavers (self-explanatory), his first feature begins as a retro episode of Barney & Friends, swapping out the friendly purple dinosaur for an orange unicorn named Buddy. There’s some incredible attention to detail in the cursed children’s TV show set decor, establishing a Pee-wee’s Playhouse style world where every piece of furniture is alive & costumed with googly eyes. Buddy rules over them all as a fascist tyrant, redirecting all attention & behavior from his various “friends” to focus on him at all times, all in the name of mandatory fun. Unfortunately, Kelly then breaks format while sketching about the basic rules of Buddy’s televised universe, leaving that colorful playhouse set for a much more mundane world outside its invisible barriers. When we’re trapped inside the Barney parody with an abusive dictator unicorn, Buddy easily lands all of its discomforting laughs & scares. When Kelly deviates from that format, it feels like a confession that this project should’ve just been another short, since the idea can’t fully sustain itself at feature length.
Simon Glassman’s own directorial debut Buffet Infinity demonstrates a much more admirably stubborn commitment to its own bit. Buffet Infinity tells a surprisingly legible Lovecraftian horror story through a series of local restaurant commercials for fictional businesses in Alberta, Canada. What starts as petty political attack ads between a local mom & pop sandwich shop and a corporate buffet chain quickly escalates into a town-wide hostile takeover, with an entire community swallowed whole by a single insatiable restaurant franchise. Its individual commercial parodies recall the awkward sub-professional sketch comedy of Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, edited together with the relentless intensity of an Everything is Terrible! mixtape. For all of its high-concept buffoonery, though, it still makes a fairly coherent point about how everything decent in the world is currently being devoured in some soulless corporate acquisition. All of the quaint hometown flavor of your neighborhood sandwich shop’s family-recipe “secret sauce” is being obliterated by grotesquely underpriced, overstuffed fast-food deals for meat-tower monstrosities with names like “The Beyond Comprehension Burger.” Buffet Infinity urges you to shop local, protect your loved ones, and take shelter until this soulless corporate takeover is all over.
I don’t think the full story of what Casper Kelly’s Buddy means in the current moment of post-Adult Swim absurdist comedy will be clear for some time. The film is still seeking a theatrical distributor after its mixed-reviews premiere at Sundance, and its public perception won’t fully solidify until it can be compared to the other upcoming Barney subversion, improbably reported to be written by Ayo Edrbiri and produced by Daniel Kaluuya. Meanwhile, Buffet Infinity is a self-contained, fully realized project with contracted distribution in the works from Yellow Veil, to be enjoyed by freaked-out stoners everywhere by the end of the year. Together, they made for a perfectly overwhelming double feature at this year’s Overlook, likely the strangest pairing I’ve seen at the fest since I watched Greener Grass back-to-back with Peter Strickland’s killer-dress anthology In Fabric in 2019. Praise be to the Overlook programmers for their longtime commitment to keeping the Adult Swim spirit alive at the festival, love & respect to Vera Drew for acting as that spirit’s living mascot at this year’s fest, good luck to Casper Kelly for finding his way out of his current distribution limbo, congratulations to Glassman, hail Satan, and all the rest.
Damien McCarthy quickly became a legend at The Overlook when the festival screened his 2024 spookshow Oddity to a loudly reactive crowd, then snuck in one last scare on the way out by propping up its creepy wooden puppet at the theater’s only exit. Oddity had great word of mouth in the queues between showtimes that year, celebrated as the rare movie to actually scare the jaded horror-nerd audiences who’ve already seen it all. McCarthy’s return to the festival with 2026’s Hokum was highly anticipated, then, boosted by the savvy marketing team at Neon and the name-recognition star wattage of Adam Scott. With Hokum, McCarthy once again demonstrated a unique talent for constructing an effective jump scare (even eliciting a top-volume scream from a fellow Swampflixer, whom I will not name & shame in this review). That’s why it’s a little disappointing that the scares are so sparse in this bigger-budget follow-up, where McCarthy is determined to dwell in Elevated Horror atmosphere instead of routinely setting up & knocking out the scare gags he stages so well. Although each were effective, I can count Hokum‘s memorable scares on a single hand, while the majority of its runtime was spent exploring every inch of its haunted hotel setting in near silence.
A spooky atmosphere goes a long way, though, and McCarthy makes intriguing use of Hokum‘s haunted hotel location by sidestepping the type of supernatural ghoul you’d typically expect to confront there. Adam Scott stars as an asshole alcoholic novelist who’s hoping to spend a few days quietly ignoring the world in a remote Irish inn. Against his will, he accidentally makes friends with the inn’s snarky bartender (Florence Ordesh) and then finds himself investigating the mysterious circumstances of her sudden disappearance (and presumable murder). That vigilante Murder He Wrote investigation quickly gets the novelist trapped in the hotel’s haunted honeymoon suite, where he’s tormented by vengeful spirits of the past. The most shocking thing about Hokum, then, is that it’s not technically a ghost story, at least not in the traditional sense. Adam Scott’s spooked protagonist is specifically locked in an Old Dark House setting with a witch—not a ghost—who’s occasionally joined (or takes the form of?) a humanoid rabbit with a wicked sense of humor. She is a stereotypically witchy hag, warts & all, when the film’s setup leads you to expect another classic Halloween costume entirely (a bedsheet with eyeholes).
Hokum was not the only bait-and-switch ghost story I saw at this year’s Overlook. Taratoa Stappard’s debut feature Mārama also plays with Gothic Horror visual tropes that lead its audience to expect traditional ghostly hauntings, but its version of a haunted house story turns out to be “spiritual” in an entirely different sense. Adriana Osborne stars as a 19th century Māori woman who travels from New Zealand to England in search of her missing twin sister. The spirits of her sister, her mother, and another ancestor do haunt the spooky English estate she sets out to investigate, but her supernatural connection to them is more rooted in Māori religious traditions than in haunted-house movie tropes. The real horror haunting the house is not these women’s lingering spirits but the greater evil of British colonialism, which is what displaced them from New Zealand in the first place. Every time our troubled paranormal investigator is confronted with a supernatural scare, it’s always represented as some pilfered & perverted aspect of her culture: relocated homes, ceremonial masks, mutilated whales, a straight-up minstrel show, etc. Mārama is the kind of politically furious, grounded-to-reality horror story you can tell only dabbles in genre tropes because it’s more difficult to get funding for an arthouse drama on the same subject. See also: Nikyatu Jusu’s kinda-sorta folk horror Nanny.
Yûta Shimotsu’s Lovecraftian horror comedy New Group also dabbles in classic haunted-house movie atmospheres, but it proves to be even more difficult to pin to a single genre designation than Hokum or Mārama. Like McCarthy, Shimotsu quickly became an Overlook crowd favorite with his previous picture, Best Wishes to All, but his follow-up swerved in much more inscrutable directions. New Groupmight be an alien invasion story; it’s hard to say. It’s certainly a variation on the Uzumaki plot, trading in Junji Ito’s town-wide obsession with spirals for a town-wide obsession with “human pyramid” gymnastic formations. Inexplicably, a human pyramid is forming outside a small-town Japanese high school, gradually growing to skyscraper scale one joiner at a time. It’s unclear what’s inspiring this sudden social phenomenon except a generalized urge to belong, and it quickly spreads off-campus to inspire different cheerleader-style human structures elsewhere in town. Because of the film’s scope & budget, though, it’s difficult to convey the widespread danger of the phenomenon, so Shimotsu shrinks the threat down to a single container: the high school gym. Only, the gym was temporarily converted to a Halloween-style haunted house by the students before they were compelled to join the pyramid, providing a traditionally spooky environment for the town’s few defectors to be chased around by the mind-zapped gymnasts in their midst. Supernatural hijinks ensue, both inside the makeshift haunted house and on the playground outside the high school’s walls.
New Group is a delightful headscratcher for audiences of any age, but it’s going to blow the mind of the right teenager who’s watching their first Weird Movie in the exact phase when their #1 enemy is Conformity. The genre-filmmaking payoffs of Hokum & Mārama are much more immediately apparent, since their own haunted house settings are merely stages for their bigger interests in jump scares & political commentary. As a group, this unlikely international trio illustrates just how flexible horror movie tropes as old-hat as a Haunted House still are. Each film uses that setting for an entirely different purpose, stocking it with an entirely different monster: witches, ancestral spirits, and gymnastics-obsessed townie conformists who may or may not be mind-controlled by space aliens, respectively. The reason strictly horror-focused film festivals like Overlook never get tiresome is because the genre allows for that kind of tonal & thematic range, freeing filmmakers to be as scary or political or absurd as they want, trusting that audiences is familiar enough with the environment that they’re game for anything you stage within it.
Welcome to Episode #263 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, including Larry Fessenden’s hipster NYC vampire flick Habit (1995).
00:00 The Overlook Film Festival 01:34 The Boulet Brothers 10:26 Hokum (2026) 18:55 Buffet Infinity (2026) 25:40 Buddy (2026) 36:01 Faces of Death (2026) 39:46 Obsession (2026) 43:10 Leviticus (2026) 44:48 The Furious (2026) 47:33 New Group (2026) 49:15 Boorman and the Devil (2026)
Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.
If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.
I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.
You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.
During one of this year’s pre-screening introductions, it was announced that The New Orleans French Film Festival is the longest running foreign-language film festival in the United States. That’s an impressive feat for such a humble, unassuming event. Even though it’s a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar, French Film Fest is by far the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society’s two annual festivals. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper. That casual, low-stakes atmosphere is a major part of its charm. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do than hide from the few days of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. There are even short stints of time allotted to make friends outside in the sunshine, in line between start times. I make sure to never miss it.
I caught four films during this year’s festival. A couple were older titles, a couple were new releases, and they were all the exact kind of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access streaming at home (unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling film festival calendar). It felt great to spend a weekend watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener instead of puzzling through them alone on streaming, where they’d fight for attention with my diabolically addictive smartphone apps. It may be one of the city’s least flashy film festivals, but its casual, accessible, warmly friendly vibe is what makes it also one of our best. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence! And, while we’re at it, vive les théâtres!
Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every title I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, listed in the order that they screened.
Orpheus (1950)
One of the more charming quirks of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning Classic Movies series into the program. This year, that repertory slot was filled by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which previously played in the same slot way back in the Before Times of 2019. The programmers took the chance to make a mini-Cocteau retrospective out of the event this time around, pairing Beauty and the Beast with the director’s second-most celebrated title, 1950’s Orpheus (and inviting Cocteau scholar Chloe Cassens to contextualize both presentations). As with Beauty and the Beast, it was a pure pleasure to experience Orpheus for the first time in a proper theater, rewarding my procrastination in not catching up with it sooner on The Criterion Channel. Also like Beauty and the Beast, it retells a long-familiar literary tale, aiming to wow its audience with visual splendor instead of twists in narrative. Cocteau recounts the entire Orpheus & Eurydice myth in the opening credits, fully laying out where his tale of a frustrated poet and his even more frustrated wife will go by the final reel. His major deviations from that plot template are temporal and illusionary: updating the story to a 1950s beatnik setting and playing around with cinematic magic tricks to convince the audience of its otherworldly surrealism. It’s ultimately more domestic & restrained than Beauty and the Beast, but it’s no less essential as pre-New Wave French cinema — only “cinéma de papa” if you happen to have the coolest papa in Paris.
Jean Marais stars as both Orpheus and as Cocteau’s onscreen surrogate, a famous poet who feels out of step with the chaotic Left Bank youth who are taking over his industry. Orpheus threatens to blow up his life and his marriage when he starts flirting with the personification of his own Death (María Casares), embodied as an ice-queen heiress who funds the hipper, buzzier work of his youthful competition. The introduction of Death into his household kicks off a supernatural domestic drama that straddles two worlds: life and the afterlife. His wife is transported to the afterlife first, and his efforts to bring her back mimic the more famous section of the Orpheus myth. The amazing thing is that Orpheus initially succeeds, bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living for as long as he can manage to not directly look at her. The resulting sequence is a kind of domestic screwball comedy that literalizes the emotional distance between married partners who are considering cheating on each other, as Eurydice finds an employee of Death of her own to flirt with. The husband cannot see his wife, and the marriage can only last as long as the pair can stand to not confront each other head-on. In a way, this makes Orpheus a great thematic pairing with last year’s repertory selection for the festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s domestic drama Contempt, despite the vast differences in their genre & tone.
Of course, Orpheus‘s main attraction as a cinematic relic is Cocteau’s more surreal visual touches, which are largely saved for the afterlife sequences. There, bodies move backwards and in slow motion, unmoored from the physics of real life, as if in an underwater dream. That otherworld is accessed through household mirrors, which become doorways through an unspoken magic commanded by Death. That’s where the movie really won me over. I’ve always loved when fantasy movies dive into a scary mirror realm, but I usually have to find those realms in schlocky horror films like The Evil Within & Poltergeist III or the supernatural porno Pandora’s Mirror. It was lovely to see that fantasy trope in a Good Movie for a change, one that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to recommend in mixed company. Orpheus is too closely tethered to contemporary Paris to compete with the visual extravagance of Beauty and the Beast, but when it leaves that realm to find another on the opposite side of a mirror, it’s splendidly surreal in its own way.
Dahomey (2024)
The other repertory title I caught at this year’s festival was a much more recent release. Mati Diop’s fine-art documentary Dahomey never screened locally between its 2024 premiere at Berlinale and its subsequent streaming release on Mubi, possibly because its one-hour runtime made it an awkward fit for proper theatrical distribution. Dahomey‘s quiet, distanced approach to documentary filmmaking does benefit from theatrical exhibition, though, so I’m once again grateful that my procrastination was rewarded by this festival. More importantly, it reflects well on the festival’s programmers that they thought to include such a politically combative snapshot of France’s cultural legacy, instead of merely coasting on the easy sophistication of beloved Parisian filmmakers from the past like Cocteau, Godard, and Varda. Diop looks to the past by tracking the recent return of two dozen artifacts plundered from the former Kingdom of Dahomey under French colonial rule to the modern nation of Benin. She attempts to give life back to these stolen & exported statues by literally giving them a voice, allowing them to narrate their own journey from European museums back to their African origins. We spend much of the film’s first half in the darkened crate during transport, then watch the statues’ identity emerge while being cataloged & contextualized once they’ve returned “home.”
For all of its art-house abstraction, I was most engaged with Dahomey in its second half, when the university youth of modern Benin were allowed extensive screentime to debate what those statues’ return means historically & politically, if it means anything at all. It likely does mean something that the conversation—much like the artifacts’ return—is left frustratingly incomplete, with many of the students pointing out the insult of only two dozen artifacts being returned out of the seven thousand that were initially stolen. Not all of the Beninese reaction to the statues’ return is verbal, though. Often, we silently observe the observers, as visitors to the artifacts’ new museum home are documented as reflections in the display glass. What does it mean that these objects are now stored in an African museum instead of a European one, still removed from their original ceremonial purposes? Diop asks this question with no intent of answering it, and the voice she gives the statues is just as confused about what to do to fix the evils of the French colonial past as anyone else. The displacement has already happened; what to do next is literally up for debate. All she can do in the meantime is document the unsettled dissonance of the present.
The Piano Accident (2026)
The two new releases I caught this year were directed by French Film Fest regulars, starting with a new one from returning prankster Quentin Dupieux. Dupieux’s talking-leather-jacket horror comedy Deerskin became Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2020 after its riotous premiere at the festival, mere weeks before COVID-era lockdowns made it one of the year’s only theatrical outings for the crew. I only mention that to note that this year’s The Piano Accident is Dupieux’s best movie since Deerskin, despite heavy competition in intervening Swampflix favorites Mandibles & Smoking Causes Coughing. The major constant in those three Deerskin follow-ups is Dupieux’s ongoing collaboration with French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who has been making a bigger & bigger fool of herself in each outing, seemingly relishing the opportunity to de-glam and de-sexualize her onscreen image. Whereas she previously appeared in Dupieux’s goofball comedies as a scene-stealing supporting player, The Piano Accident expands their collaboration into a leading role, casting Exarchopoulos as a sociopathic social media influencer with no redeeming qualities beyond her skills to debase herself for money. She takes great delight in making herself ugly, inside and out, and their ongoing collaboration reaches new heights of deliberately vacuous absurdity in the process.
The titular piano incident is a social media stunt involving a piano dropped from a great height, turning a classic Looney Tunes gag into a grisly tragedy. The monster responsible for that tragedy is a ruthless content creator who goes by the screen name Megajugs (Exarchopoulos, naturally). At first, Megajugs appears to be a collection of off-putting physical quirks. She has the obnoxious laugh, haircut, braces, cruelty, and sense of humor of a teenage boy, stunted in her maturity from earning online fame at an early age. Her ugliness is revealed to run much deeper than the surface, however, when she’s blackmailed into her first longform interview by a journalist who wants to dig past her blank-stare surface. What that journalist finds is a vast, terrifying nothingness. Megajugs saw an out-of-context clip from Jackass as a teenager, discovered that she can make money hurting herself for other people’s amusement in increasingly violent “pranks” on her own body (smashing her hand with a hammer, setting herself on fire, “testing” her family’s electric turkey carver, etc.), and has since devolved into a nihilistic routine of producing self-harm video #content for likes — partly for profit, mostly out of habit. Dupiuex invites you to laugh at her self-destructive online stunts (such as dropping a grand piano on her own legs from a ten-meter height), the step back and gawk at the horrific mindset of someone who would produce or consume that content for idle amusement.
If The Piano Accident has anything direct to say about our post-social media world, it’s that nothing means anything, and the internet has turned us all into miserable pieces of shit. Looking at the larger breadth of his recent output, I think he’s also been expressing a growing frustration with having to explain his own meaningless, absurdist pranks. In Yannick, a theatrical audience talks back in open hostility to a stage play they see no meaning in. In Daaaaaalí, famous surrealist Salvador Dalí evades explaining the meaning behind his work to a documentarian who attempts to sit him down for a sincere interview. The Piano Accident voices that artistic discomfort with audiences & journalists even louder, with the villainous Megajugs grunting in frustration over the expectation to interact with her fans or to explain her artistic intent to the press. She has no idea why she hurts herself for other people’s entertainment other than that she feels compelled to do so. It’s starting to become clear Dupieux feels similarly about his own work; it’s more a matter of routine & compulsion than it is an intellectual pursuit. Thankfully, in both Dupieux’s & Megajugs’s cases the art itself is consistently funny, so it doesn’t matter in the moment that there’s a menacing meaningless behind the cheap-thrills surface. That’s something for you to ponder on your own time, miserably.
The Stranger (2026)
François Ozon is just as much of a New Orleans Film Festival staple as Quentin Dupieux, with past Swampflix favorites When Fall Comes & Double Lover seeing their local premieres at the fest. His latest film, The Stranger, is an adaptation of the eponymous 1940s Albert Camus novel, about an eerily vacant white man who murders an Indigenous local in French-occupied Algeria for seemingly no reason at all. Thematically, it splits the differences between all of the other titles I caught at this year’s fest, combining the literary traditions of Orpheus, the anti-colonialist politics of Dahomey, and the disturbingly vacuous absurdism of The Piano Accident into a single picture. Compared to the rest of Ozon’s catalog, it’s a little too stately to register among his personal best, but it very well might be his prettiest. There’s something to the John Waters adage that “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, ‘The cinematography was beautiful,’ it’s a bad movie,” but since The Stranger is partly a story about the vast nothingness lurking under the surface of things, I feel okay saying that the black & white cinematography was beautiful, and the movie was good. It just falls slightly short of Great.
Benjamin Voisin stars as the titular stranger, a coldly quiet twentysomething who gets by on his handsome looks despite his near-sociopathic detachment from all human emotion & empathy. We first meet him as he receives the news that his elderly mother has passed away, spending two days with him in near silence while he travels to her isolated nursing home to see her body buried. As a result, we initially have no idea whether he’s always this emotionally detached or if he’s merely stunned by his grief, but it gradually becomes clear that the problem runs much deeper than familial loss. He is decidedly non-reactive to the constant human atrocities around him, from the neighbor who beats his own dog to the even nearer neighbor who beats his own lover to the daily systemic injustices against the Arab locals who walk the French-occupied streets outside his apartment. By the time he participates in those injustices by firing a gun, his apathy curdles into something much more sinister and much less personal. The entirety of human existence is literally put on trial as the movie picks at his motivations, which feel random & instinctual rather than meaningful. He simply just is, and existence is horrifying.
Camus’s political & philosophical ponderings at how “we are all guilty, we are all condemned” eventually prove worthy of the time spent with this quiet, impenetrable protagonist, but it’s a long journey to get there. The 1st-person voiceover narration that would give the stranger’s actions immediate meaning is delayed until after his random act of shocking violence in the 2nd act, so it takes a while for the narrative significance of the 1st-act events of his life to become clear. Before the terrifying nothingness of his personality is exposed in a French courtroom, we mostly just watch him sip coffee, have sex, smoke cigarettes, and experience a sustained, lifelong ennui — the standard French existence. If you have the patience to discover how the unremarkable hallmarks of his persona implicate much larger, existential evils outside his immediate orbit, the movie ultimately rewards you for sticking it out. Notably, part of that reward is hearing The Cure’s debut single “Killing an Arab” over the end credits, which will be stuck in your head for most of the runtime leading up to that stinger anyway. It’s a thuddingly obvious needle drop, but by the time it arrives it’s a welcome relief from singing it internally yourself.
There’s a new low-budget horror film in theaters right now that’s main mission is to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of 70s horror classics like Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That statement has been more or less constantly true since at least as far back as when Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses hit theaters two decades ago; there’s always a new horror film in theaters that aims to recall the vintage grindhouse grime of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as surely as the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Even so, the new film Dolly is grimier than most, torturing its audience with the squirmiest discomforts any Texas Chainsaw knockoff has delivered in a long while. Our Leatherface figure in this instance is the titular Dolly, a childlike behemoth who wears a porcelain babydoll mask and collects victims to play house with her in the woods of Tennessee. Like 1973’s The Baby, it toddles across the fine line between shock-value horror and age-regression fetish content, having its towering killer spank, bottle-feed, burp, and diaper her victims in-between her gory kills. It has its contemporaries in that particular mode of discomfort (most notably Zach Cregger’s Barbarian and the straight-to-Tubi stunner Match), but it decides to frame its fucked up found-family horror story within an older grindhouse tradition by shooting on 16mm film, instantly adding a layer of grime on top of its forced-dollification imagery. That choice elevates Dolly‘s sense of mise-en-scène, especially in sequences set outdoors in a woodland babydoll art-instillation piece reminiscent of Georgia’s Doll’s Head Trail. It’s also a somewhat safe, expected choice, though, since it excuses some of its budgetary shortcomings by hiding them behind a faux-vintage appeal instead of fully embracing the modernity of the ABDL horror story it tells.
Dolly‘s distribution rights were purchased by the online streaming service Shudder, so its accompanying theatrical release has been relatively small. In New Orleans, that means it is exclusively playing at the AMC multiplexes of the suburbs, since those venues tend to have more screens to fill than the smaller, choosier independent theaters in the city proper. Specifically, I saw Dolly at the AMC Palace 20 in Elmwood, which regularly offers the city’s widest selection of new-release titles . . . in the shittiest presentation imaginable. Outside its two “premium” (i.e., price-gouging) Dolby & IMAX screens, the other 18 theaters at the Elmwood Palace have been allowed to steadily decline into disrepair. The projector bulbs are all well past end-of-life, so that every movie is blurred behind a dark, purplish bruise hue that your eyes never fully adjust to. The bathroom floors are eternally gummy with piss, and every time you touch a handle with your bare hands it feels like you’re risking a life-threatening skin infection. I’m used to all of this, and I occasionally put up with it because of the unmatched breadth of the venue’s marquee offerings, ranging from woodland slasher throwbacks to niche-interest anime to Indian action epics to the latest Dinesh D’Souza doc about how Hilary Clinton is the antichrist; they have everything. My trip out there to see Dolly hit a new all-time low, though, in pure technical terms. Not only was the projection as darkly bruised as ever, but now the sound was equally muddled. Either the mixing in my theater was way out of balance or multiple sound channels were fully switched off, so that all dialogue was clearly legible but the accompanying music and foley effects were so muffled it sounded as if they were playing in another room. That’s a big deal for a horror film, since the genre relies heavily on music for tension and loud sound-effect stingers for jump scares. It’s a credit to the novelty of Dolly‘s costume & production design that I found anything to enjoy about the experience, since the theater stripped away everything else it had to offer.
Oddly enough, that abysmal theatrical presentation was historically authentic to the retro grindhouse experience modern horrors like Dolly aim to evoke. Grindhouses were a quantity-over-quality business, running exploitation films with shortened runtimes at a breakneck pace with little regard to the building collapsing around the projector. Anyone who’s ever waxed nostalgic about catching some vintage slasher or porno relic at a grindhouse cinema on 42nd Street always includes some anecdote about how the film was interrupted by rats crawling across their feet, or a public blowjob, or a projectionist who nodded off mid-film and had to be woken up to change the reels. The only thing that’s changed is that these used to be decidedly urban experiences, often adjacent to strip clubs & brothels in the center of a morally & physically decaying city. Now, that geographic dynamic has flipped. I get grindhouse-quality projections out in the decaying AMC Palaces of the suburbs, who could not give less of a shit about what they’re screening or how it looks & sounds, as long as they can grind through as many titles as possible. Meanwhile, the urban cinemas of New Orleans proper have been putting much more thoughtful care into their programming & presentation. The same week I saw Dolly in theaters I also attended a repertory screening of Sam Raimi’s 1987 splatstick classic Evil Dead II at The Broad, programmed by ScreamFest NOLA. In some ways, the original Evil Dead movies are the exact kind of high-style, low-budget woodland horrors Dolly attempts to emulate, with the major exception that Sam Raimi moves his camera like no other horror schlockteur before or since. In Evil Dead II, he escalates the cartoonish violence of his calling-card indie debut to a bigger, slicker production scale—beating Hollywood studios to the punch in effectively remaking his own film—but it’s still the kind of low-brow screen filler that used to be left to the drive-ins and grindhouses of old and is now lovingly presented in crisp, clean quality in urban cultural epicenters like The Broad, restored & reclaimed.
Even New Orleans’s dive bars are putting more thought & effort into their movie screenings than the AMCs of the suburbs, even though they’re not technically in the theatrical exhibition business. Siberia is primarily a music venue but has recently experimented with screening vintage genre classics with live music accompaniment. Typically, this means projecting the nu-metal relic Queen of the Damned behind unrelated live performances from local metal bands, but last week it meant presenting Mamoru Oshii’s surreal anime classic Angel’s Egg with an all-new, feature-length live score. Angel’s Egg is already the kind of inscrutable arthouse experience that offers gorgeous, evocative images that its audience can’t fully make sense of but continuously pulls emotional reactions out of us anyway. Rewatching it with live accompaniment from spooky, droning synths helped physicalize that emotional response, vibrating the audience’s bodies with crushing waves of sound while confusing our minds with haunting, post-apocalyptic imagery. The projection itself admittedly did not look especially great, to the point where half the audience were craning their necks at painful angles to read the more legible subtitles off the TV hanging over the bar (despite that dialogue doing very little to clear up what’s actually happening on screen). The sound was phenomenal, though, with a lot of care paid to matching each action onscreen to appropriate musical cues. Those communal screenings of Angel’s Egg and Evil Dead II felt extremely passionate & personal for the people who programmed them. In contrast, the AMC theaters just outside the city offer outright hostile moviegoing experiences, punishing their audiences with headache-inducing ad packages and the shittiest projection quality ever suffered by the human eye. When the AMC Palaces opened here in the 1990s, they put local independent cinemas out of business by crushing them under corporate-sponsored grandeur. They’re now a callous quantity-over-quantity business, the new American grindhouse. I can’t say I’m exactly grateful to have seen Dolly in that modern grindhouse context, but it was at least textually appropriate.
Like many New Orleanians, I spent Ash Wednesday hung over at church. For most people, that would mean getting your forehead smeared with ashes at St. Louis Cathedral (often while still wearing tattered remnants of a Mardi Gras costume), but for me it meant taking off work to cool down at The Movies. I made a rare trip out to the AMC Palaces of the suburbs for a discordant double feature of Scarlet & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, easing a mild headache by enjoying junk food & soda in the dark. It was a restorative experience, as always, but it was also a reminder of how much more pleasant & casual of a ritual it is to visit independent theaters like The Prytania & The Broad closer to home. In particular, the AMC pre-show is especially uncomfortable & draining if you’re not used to visiting that chain on a regular basis and forget that it’s custom to deliberately show up late. Before the trailers begin, you’re bombarded with advertisements hosted by Maria Menounos, who only occasionally pops in to reframe the experience as a trivia game instead of a bigger, louder TV ad break. Then, at the announced start time, the actual previews begin, and they’re also bookended with TV-style advertisements for products like Coca-Cola, M&Ms, and luxury cars. That thirty-minute(!) trailer package then concludes with additional advertisements for AMC itself (an experience you’ve already purchased and are seated for), including the infamous Nicole Kidman “We come to this place for magic” commercial which has now been chopped up and streamlined to the point of total incoherence. The entire experience is exhausting and, seemingly, designed to be avoided rather than engaged with. I can’t believe I did it twice in one day. It’s possible my hangover wasn’t even a result of the previous day’s partying; it was at least partly an AMC A-List branded headache.
I had completely forgotten about my Ash Wednesday pre-show woes until my next discordant double feature experience a few weeks later, when I caught two classic movies at two independent theaters in New Orleans proper. I spent a recent Sunday morning watching Sidney Lumet’s 1976 classic Network in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, then hopped over to Zeitgeist in Arabi for an afternoon screening of Harold Lloyd’s 1923 career-maker Safety Last!, presented with live piano accompaniment. Those two movies have very little to say about each other in their themes or methods, despite both being riotously funny comedies from the American studio system. If they share a common theme, it’s about rat-race Capitalism. Network posits itself as a vicious blow in the great war between cinema & television for mass media supremacy, then openly acknowledges that the distinction between the two mediums ultimately doesn’t matter because it’s all just corporate sludge anyway. The pursuit of profits in its fictional TV broadcast newsrooms quickly leads to manic, lethal decision making that gets people killed — live, on-air, for ratings. For its part, Safety Last! asks “Why climb the corporate ladder when you can just climb the corporation itself?” In an effort to earn enough money to marry his small-town sweetheart, Harold Lloyd climbs the department store that employs him as a sales clerk to drum up publicity for sales, nearly killing himself in the process — for our delight & entertainment. You know what, maybe they aren’t so different after all. They’re both New York City stories about violent publicity stunts, and both of their most iconic moments (Network‘s “I’m mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” monologue and Safety Lasts!‘s death-defying climb up the side of a skyscraper) are decorated with ticking clocks. Not for nothing, they’re also two widely revered classics, so I have less to report about how great they are than I do about how they were presented.
Most of the Prytania Classic Movies I’ve attended recently have been preceded by a classic cartoon. There are no trailers or TV commercials in the pre-roll, just a brief in-person intro from the series’ programmer, followed by classic shorts of Popeye & Bugs Bunny doing bits. It’s wonderful, as it’s just about as close as you’ll ever get to experiencing the pre-show packages of Old Hollywood. Their presentation of Network indulged a slight deviation from the usual format, as they substituted the Looney Tunes short for a different kind of old-system pre-show: the newsreel. Network was preceded by an old MGM short titled “Beautiful Banff and Lake Louise,” produced for the studio’s TravelTalks travelogue series. There’s no apparent reason why that exact TravelTalks short was chosen out of the hundreds that MGM produced from the 1930s through the 1950s, as it transports the viewers in the theater to the Canadian Rockies, thousands of miles away from Network‘s NYC skyscrapers. However, it did serve as sharp contrast against the more contemporary version of news coverage that Network depicts, as well as the more contemporary movie-studio culture that got Network greenlit. The inciting incident of Network is the firing of an alcoholic TV news anchor (Peter Finch), who quickly becomes famous by threatening to kill himself on air and declaring that all TV news is “bullshit.” You won’t find a more exemplary example of vintage news-reporting bullshit than TravelTalks, which is functionally an advertisement for distant vacation resorts while pretending to offer the public documentary footage of Nature. It’s especially jarring to hear the short’s narrator boast about the gorgeous Canadian vistas which had been unseen by “the white race” until recent years, previously guarded from intruders by indigenous “Indian” combatants but now available to serve as a postcard backdrop for your next hotel stay. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s as boring and artless as the AMC pre-show commercials of today, but it was also a useful snapshot of the world Network later attempted to shake up with its more cynical, radical politics.
Zeitgeist’s pre-show selection for Safety Last! was more of a no-brainer. To warm the audience up for Lloyd’s building-scaling antics, in-house pianist David Bradley also live-scored a previous short from the same Criterion disc titled “His Royal Slyness.” Instead of being set in modern NYC, “His Royal Slyness” takes place in the fictional European kingdom of Thermosa, where Lloyd’s vaudevillian antics upset the propriety of a royal court. Much like in Safety Last!, Lloyd woos his love interest by pretending to be above his station — in this case a noble prince instead of a department store bigwig. Antics ensue, but notably it’s the same kind of antics that followed in the feature presentation. Both films depict Lloyd mindlessly plucking at the accoutrement of a fellow bystander when nervous (flower petals in Safety Last!, war metals in “His Royal Slyness”), covering the heads of nuisances he doesn’t want to deal with (with a fabric sample in Safety Last! and a king’s robe in “His Royal Slyness”), and evading the capture of authorities through increasingly elaborate schemes (vengeful cops in Safety Last!, insurrectionist mobs in “His Royal Slyness”). In a better world where movie theaters didn’t have to constantly squeeze more pennies out of every aspect of the moviegoing experience just to keep the lights on, this would be the perfect formula for a pre-show package: a feature-relevant short film that expands the context of the main presentation for audiences who made it to their seats on time but still helpfully delays the show by a few minutes for anyone who happens to be running late. I only mention the running late bit because I caught a passing train and a raised bridge on my drive out to Arabi that afternoon, and it eased my mind knowing that even if I missed the start time, the listed pre-show short would ensure I wouldn’t miss a minute of Safety Last!.
Safety Last! is over a century old now, Network has been around for half that time, and both still kill with modern audiences. Even if you’re already familiar with their most iconic moments—the “Mad as hell!” speech and the clock hanging, respectively—the rest of the runtime around those moments still hits with full, fresh impact. Network was infinitely more heightened & insane that I imagined it would be, since the crazed-news-anchor-holds-a-TV-station-hostage premise I was familiar with only accounts for the first act, and things get exponentially out of control from there, presenting a major-studio escalation of Putney Swope. Safety Last! also has a strikingly modern anti-cop sentiment in its own heightened politics, with the hapless hero of the piece only put in danger because his best bud is being chased by a pig who can’t take a joke. Even without a live piano punctuating the room’s constant laughs & gasps, it would still be an electric communal experience. Some small part of that communality, I think, is attributable to the pre-show. Instead of being held hostage by a corporate ad package that buried us in our seats under a mountain of Coca-Cola slogans, we were all acclimating to the same wavelength with pre-feature mood-setters. Even the pre-show advertisements for concessions were more pleasant at the neighborhood spots, with The Prytania rolling its usual “Let’s all go to the lobby!” jingle and Zeitgeist pausing briefly for a snack-purchasing intermission between short & feature because that just happened to be the mood of the room. The pre-show is ultimately a small, trivial aspect of the movie-going experience, but I wouldn’t say it’s totally inconsequential. It can greatly affect the mood of the room, mostly by signaling the levels of hostility or solidarity theaters hold for their audience.
Before I got a chance to see Emerald Fennell’s recent “adaptation” “Wuthering Heights,” I stumbled across this social media post in the wild:
I had just recently completed my own most recent rewatch of 1987’s Flowers in the Attic, and I became fixated on this idea. I’ve been down the Flowers in the Attic rabbit hole more times than I’d care to remember, but at its core, I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between Emily Brontë’s and V.C. Andrews’s novels. I don’t know if there’s any academic discussion of this out there, but I have no doubt in my mind that Andrews drew inspiration from Wuthering Heights, from naming her protagonist “Cathy” to making the implied, sublimated incest of Heights (I’ve always subscribed to the theory that Heathcliff is Earnshaw’s bastard son, meaning he and Catherine are half-siblings) explicit and pervasive in Flowers in the Attic and its sequels.
When I did get around to seeing “Wuthering Heights,” my major criticism of it ended up being that it doesn’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t, be Wuthering Heights at all. The most interesting characters in that film are Alison Oliver’s Isabella and Hong Chau’s Nelly, and one could have done a Rosaline style film about the former or even gone full-tilt into the “Nelly is the villain” concept and made a Cruella style picture about the latter, and either one of them would have been infinitely more interesting than watching “Wuthering Heights” bash two sexy Australian Barbie dolls at each other while reenacting a half-remembered SparkNote. In essence, both Flowers in the Attic and “Wuthering Heights” are both unfaithful mutations of the same source material, which means that Fennell might actually be the perfect person to make a Flowers in the Attic adaptation. Right?
I don’t think so… however, I do think that she would be the ideal person to adapt the first follow-up novel, Petals on the Wind. It would be incorrect to say that Petals is an easier novel to read than Flowers. While it may eschew most of the more taboo elements that made Flowers so salacious, adult Cathy finds herself in just as dire straits in Petals, where she is constantly subject to sexual danger regardless of which of her husbands is exerting force over her. Based on the overall negative reaction to Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (which I didn’t share), I don’t think that she has the sensitivity needed to present Flowers. This is, after all, a director who looked at the same source text that Andrews did and, where Andrews saw both the tenderness and the danger of Heathcliff and Cathy together and the way that it would affect future generations, instead got horned up by imagining them getting off to voyeuristic observation of a couple of servants going at it in a barn. But also, don’t worry, in this version Cathy and Heathcliff definitely aren’t half-siblings, so don’t worry, it’s okay if you get aroused!
For those who are interested, Flowers in the Attic (the novel) doesn’t end in the same way that the ‘87 film does. The latter includes a hastily-shot death scene for Corrine Dollanganger after being confronted by her children during her wedding to Bart Winslow, her late father’s lawyer, as producers felt that the book’s ending, which occurs when the children simply escape the house after learning that their grandfather is dead and Bart and Corrine have been married for over a year. This big confrontation scene seems like it would be right up Fennell’s alley, and the equivalent scene, in which Cathy crashes the Winslow family’s Christmas party at Foxworth Hall to reveal to Corrine that she has (a) seduced Bart and (b) is pregnant by him, is the climax of Petals on the Wind. Of course, this is between her first marriage to an abusive narcissist and her second marriage to the doctor who fostered the children following their escape. Petals also borrows from Brontë, although it’s Charlotte this time, as Paul, the aforementioned doctor, initially pretends that his wife is dead before revealing that she’s actually in an institution, such that his initial overtures toward Cathy when she is of age are much like Rochester’s towards the title character in Jane Eyre. It’s all very, very messy, a true soap opera, and that’s the wheelhouse that Fennell would most bloom in if she took that opportunity.
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